The Teaching and Learning Center invites applications from teams of Graduate Center student instructors who wish to write guides to teaching in their disciplines. This is a funded opportunity. 

For the past three years, staff at the Graduate Center’s Teaching and Learning Center have been writing and updating the Teach@CUNY Handbook, a practical guide to teaching in the CUNY context. We have produced three versions of the Handbook, and an annotatable version is available on Manifold. In its day-to-day work, the TLC supports student instructors who are teaching in dozens of disciplines, and the Handbook is written for as broad an audience as possible. 

With this project, we seek to extend the Handbook to engage the kinds of methodological, epistemological, theoretical, and practical questions that we face when thinking through how to engage a diverse group of undergraduate students in our disciplines. When paired with the broader guidance offered by the Teach@CUNY Handbook, these disciplinary guides will help current and future graduate student instructors enter the classroom equipped with a range of pedagogical strategies, both general and specific.    

In 2019-2020, the Teaching and Learning Center will fund the creation of up to four disciplinary handbooks. Each project will receive $2500, to be split between at least two contributors (teams can be as big as five). All participants will meet as a single group in the fall semester to discuss editorial strategies and approaches. First drafts of the guides will be due April 15, 2020. They will be reviewed by TLC staff as well as by senior scholars within the field, and final drafts will be posted to Manifold by June 1, 2020. Funded projects will also be presented at a showcase in spring 2020. 

Each guide should be no more than 6000 words, and should balance broad discussions of the methodological goals of instruction in a particular field with practical guidance for in class activities and assignments. Priority will be given to teams that define their disciplines broadly during this round of the project. For instance, it may be desirable to create a guide to teaching modern European history at some point in the future, but in this round we would be more likely to fund a proposal focused on teaching history more generally.   

If you have questions about how to approach team assembly, workflow, and coverage within your discipline, please reach out to TLC director Luke Waltzer to discuss: lwaltzer@gc.cuny.edu. 

Application process: 

Interested applicants should send the following:

• A statement of no more than 500 words that describes the team assembled for the project (areas of expertise, courses taught) and makes an argument for what undergraduates studying in the proposed discipline should know at the end of an introductory level course, as well as the range of topics/methods the team will cover.
• CVs for all participants. 

Applications will be evaluate for the depth of college teaching experience represented among the applicants, the clarity of the writing, and the strength of the arguments made about the discipline to be covered.

Applications should be sent as a single, combined PDF to tlc@gc.cuny.edu with the subject line “Disciplinary Handbook Application.” 

All currently enrolled Graduate Center students who have taught multiple courses at the college level are eligible to apply for this opportunity.

Applications are due by 10 am October 16.